Streetcars? Really?

239 million dollars. It sort of boggles my mind. I just keep hearing, “Is this the highest and best use of $239m in our community?” “In our relatively resource-poor community, are streetcars our most pressing need?” “When we look to the future, are streetcars what will get us there?”

Priorities

Our kids are going to have shorter lives than their parents because of an epidemic of obesity. How did streetcars become a priority over sports parks for kids? Education is widely agreed upon as the number one issue in our community. How did streetcars get prioritized over education?

Even in transportation, our streets and sidewalks are in desperate need of repair. How did we decide that we needed a few miles of streetcars, rather than hundreds of miles of street and sidewalk renovation?

Our city bond proposal is hamstrung by having to put $340m into streets, bridges and sidewalks. So much of the proposed bond is dedicated to that category that there is almost nothing left for parks and community facilities. Parks is forced to spend nearly all of its $65m on deferred maintenance – things that should have been taken care of in annual budgets. There is little increase in capacity in a community that desperately needs capacity.

If $90m of the now $160m that the city and county have “found” to build streetcars was used for bond projects, that $90m could be freed up to develop new parks all over our city.

What if we suddenly had a $90m endowment for scholarships to our community colleges? How would that change us educationally? How would that change us in the eyes of employers coming to town?

A $90m endowment would generate $3.6m worth of scholarships, every year, FOREVER. Or perhaps we could endow science and technology scholarships at UTSA and A&M San Antonio.

Shouldn’t health and education be our priorities? Really?

Trust

It is surprising that such a monumental decision was made with so little public input, but it is also surprising that there has been so little public dissent. There is clearly public unhappiness and cynicism.

“We voted this down in 2000, but now that we opened up term limits, they are at it again.” “3 months ago, both the city and county were in budget crises. Now they have ‘found’ $180m to spend as they please.” “The politicians just do whatever they want to do.”

It does seem odd that immediately after term limits were relaxed, that their first act would be to overturn an election. It will be interesting to watch and see if this results in hyper-politicizing the next round of city and county elections. Time will tell.

Perhaps the grumbles about streetcars are there just because there are no Spurs right now. Who knows?

Technology

So we want to become the “world class city of the future” and we do that by embracing technology from the 1880s? What’s next, wood-burning stoves?

I inquired why streetcars were necessary when we already had a fleet of busses. I was told that professional people don’t like to ride busses, because they are perceived as “poor people’s transportation.” Really?

If we want busses for professional people, we can achieve that by having clean busses, with high-speed Wi-Fi, that only stop where professional people get on: Stone Oak, the Medical Center, a park-and-ride along 410, the Pearl Complex. That won’t cost $239m. Really.

Experiment

Have we experimented with this concept? We have fake trolley cars and we can buy more (apparently a LOT more if we have that kind of money laying around). Have we run rubber-wheeled-trolleys along those routes to determine ridership?

Shouldn’t we have some proof-of-concept before we spend $239m? Shouldn’t our leadership have insisted on that? Really?

Federal Funding

In Nelson Wolff’s State-of-the-County address, he said that the streetcar plan, “would give us the greatest opportunity to secure federal funding for the build-out of the whole plan.” How many TRILLION do the Feds have to cut just to be neck-deep in debt? Given that, we are betting on new federal funding. Is that a safe bet? Really?

That was especially frightening, because in the same speech Judge Wolff warned that the County would no longer be able to sustain services to our growing population. We can’t sustain services, but we can ‘find’ $120m for streetcars. Really?

Mass Transit

Full disclosure: I am a big proponent of mass transportation. I have lived in cities with superb mass transit: San Francisco, Stockholm, Chicago. I get it.

What I don’t get is why we are embracing 1880s technology to solve a problem of the 2020s. I also don’t get why, in an age of ever-tightening government budgets, we are choosing a strategy that is destined to bleed money FOREVER, when we can build a self-sustaining model with new technology.

Questions

For me, the streetcar plan offers many more questions than answers.

Is this the highest and best use of $290m in our community today?

If we put this money into our streets, bridges and sidewalks, would our city bond proposal make more sense by having the flexibility to do more parks, facilities and community initiatives?

Should we be overturning an election so shortly after extending term limits?

Why are we fixated on 1880s technology?

Is there a better way to do this?

I will try to answer that question the next time I sit down at this blog. Really.